Suggestions for Reading Improvement

[Sreeni]

The following is the Reading of my kid. 

尊重源自六分钱. 在德国，你常常能从一些细节中感受到社会对人的尊重与关怀。比如，超市有让顾客歇息的椅子，商场有专供坐轮椅的人使用的试衣间，巴士可以降低车身方便老人及残障人士上下车。这种尊重与关怀不只体现在设施上，也表现在一些生活小事中。

Could you please provide the feedback for improvement. 
 

I suggested him the reading should be continuous and not reading words and asked him to take 2 sec break at , and 4 sec break at .

But can you suggest his tones and reading? Thanks in advance

 

New Recording 5.m4a

[Jan Finster]

My honest, but blunt feedback:

 

Spoiler

 

Do not worry about the 2 or 4 second breaks. It is essentially incomprehensible. Neither the tones nor the pronunciation make any sense. 

 

 

 

I would recommend going back to texts at his level and these are likely the pinyin table and simple tone pair drills. 

 

If he is able to read (=identify the characters) this text, then his recognition of characters is clearly way ahead of his pronunciation and tones. 

[amytheorangutan]

My personal opinion is that he probably should do more pinyin drills with the help of a tutor who can tell him how to produce each pinyin sound. Yoyo Chinese and All Set Learning has good pinyin exercises but he probably would still need a feedback from a teacher. Also, I think it's probably better to start with simple sentences and text. I'm still trying to fix my pronunciation and accent and when I do my mimicking I normally use materials below my level so that I can focus on my pronunciation and not have to worry what the next character or word is. Also, I find listening to a lot of the language helps me to absorb where to pause and how the tones sound when said next to each other in a sentence and copy them that way. 

[Flickserve]

He's able to recognise a lot of characters. It shows he has worked hard at studying. Does he need to take exams for Chinese ?

 

Unfortunately, I would agree with the others and say he would not be understood at all. His pronunciation of 钱 is not even close. 

 

I would suggest he try reading a simpler text to really assess his level. Reading itself is a hard skill. He definitely needs to spend more time on listening and speaking accurately - do it without reading. For example, just shadow a sentence but try to get it accurate with tones and intonation. Please warn him beforehand that correcting pronunciation will take more than 100 to 200 repetitions of the same sounds/short sentences.

 

The good thing is that if he has shown the hard work to get this far with character recognition, he should have the necessary tenacity to work on pronunciation. Far too many people give up early practicing pronunciation because it is less fun. 

 

Just so he doesn't feel bad, I have been corrected on saying 国家 again just in the last few days. My 家 was off. I have no feelings of being hurt pride - I just accepted it and worked on it again really focussing on why my pronunciation sounds different and then correcting myself. That's after a few years of speaking the word and people understanding me in conversation.....

 

[alantin]

I agree with everything said above. While he seems to be able to read a lot of characters, most of his reading is unintelligible. Pronunciation needs a lot of work and especially the tones. It felt to me like he was reading almost all characters with the second tone. But like others said too, the problem is not limited to the tones.

 

I'm guessing that he also should have trouble recognizing the tones?

So I would start with a lot of tone recognition drills and once he can recognize the tones consistently, hire a tutor and work exclusively on pronunciation until the tutor says that they are ok. The reason I recommend beginning with the tones is that the pronunciation of anything is still wrong if the initial and final are correct, but the tone is wrong. Learning to recognize the tones may also be something that will yield quick gratification as he should notice quite quickly that he can actually pick them up. That small victory is a good basis for the rest and practicing the initial+final+tone combinations make a lot more sense when he can recognize the tones correctly.

 

The character recognition tells me that he has worked really hard, but pronunciation is such a basic skill that if it isn't corrected as soon as possible, it will cause major problems later after bad habits have cemented and it will be even harder to correct. It may already be difficult since that level of character recognition probably has required quite a lot of repetitions with incorrect ideas of how they sound.

Pronunciation drills may not be fun, but they are absolutely essential.

The good news is, that even for a speaker of a non-tonal language, the tones are possible to learn quite quickly (in a matter of weeks) with a lot of repetitions with immediate feedback.

[Sreeni]

Jan Finster, Amy, Flickserve, Alantin thanks for the feedback and suggestions for improvement. 

Flickserve, yes he is taking Chinese as subject in school.will work on 钱 and other suggestions. he is able to identify all the above characters.will work on pinyin and pronunciation. Will go with one sentence by one sentence rather full paragraph

 

[Flickserve]

@Sreeni

 

It will be frustrating to go back to the beginning. I did 20h of drills in lesson with a couple of tutors. Must have been really boring for them as well but essential for me.

 

Developing listening ability is essential. 

[Flickserve]

@Sreeni

 

How is practice going?

[Sreeni]

@Flickserve thanks for asking. My kid is having school exams and he completed Chinese exam and paper was marked.his current test is based on vocabulary and comprehension.

 

1. Fill in the blanks like 10 new vocabulary they will give 10 sentences and need to match with correct word. Few mistakes here, mostly if he did not understand the meaning of the sentence he is making mistakes. He knows some of the words, but few he is interpreting in correct. Those were corrected after exam. Some vocabulary he did not know/forgot. He learned/ relearned them.

2. Comprehension: he did not understand complete meaning of the exam comprehension. So his teachers guided him to match the words in question and in passage and asked to answer in exams if he did not understand the passage.  Some time he used to get few marks, but this time he did not get any marks in Comprehension.My understanding is he should understand the passage atleast 85%. His moral is very low. teachers teach him the vocabulary in practice comprehensions, but he writes them, but not practice..
 

my advise is to remember all the vocabulary from text books and sample papered whatever he taught. I think that is missing. Quarterly exam there is no reading test. Will practice reading again after other exams are completed. 
 

any advise ? based on the above info you can think of. 

[amytheorangutan]

@Sreeni based on what you said I think he probably need to read something slightly below his level and a lot of it before slowly moving up. It is hard to remember words without context and we need tons of repetition before we can intuitively understand how a word is being used.
 

Try to use graded readers books, the ones without pinyin on top of the characters. My favourite is Mandarin Companion but I heard a lot of people also use Chinese Breeze. I also use Du Chinese but they are just lots of short articles. He should understand around 98% of what he reads and read multiple books at that level before moving on. Textbooks and curriculum at school are not designed for repetition so they mention 10-15 new words twice and expect students to remember all of it and move on to more new words when we don’t even have the time to remember the first 10-15. Graded readers books, the good quality ones normally would repeat words a lot so they solidify in your memory. Also if your son is not interested in what he is reading, graded reader is normally a good alternative as the stories are more interesting than textbooks.

 

85% comprehension is very low and probably would be demoralising trying to read at that level, I tried to read a couple of books with 92% comprehension and that was a struggle for me. So if you can give him more interesting reading materials that are around 98% comprehension then it will help with his motivation and interest on top of improving his reading skills. 
 

 

[Sreeni]

1 hour ago, amytheorangutan said:

85% comprehension is very low and probably would be demoralising trying to read at that level, I tried to read a couple of books with 92% comprehension and that was a struggle for me. So if you can give him more interesting reading materials that are around 98% comprehension then it will help

Agree. Working on improving the comprehension step by step to 100%.
 

Recently got Outliar dictionary (Pleco add on) which he liked the way meaning was explained 

[Flickserve]

10 hours ago, Sreeni said:

any advise ? based on the above info you can think of. 

 

How are the pronunciation exercises going?

[Sreeni]

尊重源自六分钱. @amytheorangutan, @Flickserve pls check. Small sentence now. Can you provide specific feedback? Thanks

New Recording 8.m4a

[Flickserve]

29 minutes ago, Sreeni said:

Can you provide specific feedback?

 

Did he read the sentence or did he listen to a native speaker's voice and copy what they said without reading? I suspect it is the former

 

Try speaking simple sentences after listening to a native speaker say them. For example

 

我是十六岁

我是一个中学生

我没有很多钱

[amytheorangutan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHGzpiWnQDQ @Sreeni yup I agree with @Flickserve I found this random video on youtube. Maybe ask him to repeat the speaker with these sentences which are more everyday conversational sentences. I do something similar with Chinesepod. Listen and repeat is quite effective. 

[Leslie Frank]

impressive that your kid can recognize so many words.

 

as for the enunciation, you can also plug in a sentence, or clause, or fragment, at a time to: 

https://translate.google.com/ 

or 

https://ttsdemo.com/ 

to hear the different voice personalities say them. out of the currently eleven different voice personalities, there's bound to be a few that sound somewhat natural and besides, it's just a basis to start from, giving a more understandable flow and cadence to the words stringed together instead of individual word enunciations.

 

all the best.